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The whole point of the OP is that if you have merit-based students AND the landed gentry, the landed gentry get at least 4 years of interaction with smart but poor(er) backgrounded people.

Without it, you end up with some entirely merit-based schools and some true Ivory Towers and the Twain rarely meet.

The problem, in my mind, is the interaction of legacy admissions with other forms of background-based admission.

Once I'm overlooking poor test scores for the 'landed gentry' background, I've got little defence when people demand I overlook poor test scores for other backgrounds too.

Before I know it, a trivial amount of arguably-unfair-ness that was flying under the radar becomes a non-trivial amount, and now everyone's mad at me.

It’s not background, it’s donations.

While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry.

The rich don’t need to be particularly competitive academically - they are hyper-advantaged socially.

Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses, and encouraging the academically gifted to rub shoulders with those that can help them to implement their ideas is also an advantage.

I hate it but it actually makes sense to me.

I’m not sure that was the motivation in this case though, easily could have been an accounting decision.

> Exposing them to intelligent thought keeps them from being powerful ignoramuses

But would it not also, for the same reasons be good if the rich and powerful were exposed to Native Americans, military veterans, wheelchair users, religious minorities, minority sects of religious majorities, young parents, trans folk, mature students, reformed convicts, people with mental health problems, and so on?

Probably not so useful, since they would not be forced to acknowledge that those people were at least in some ways superior to them? If they know they are surrounded by intellectually superior people, it is probably the first time they are confronted with that kind of contrast. (But that’s just a guess. I suspect that the answer would be highly variable by the individual case)

> While I hate the taste, it makes sense to combine smart with powerful if you want to produce industry.

What if you want to produce equality?

Equality of outcomes, or equality of opportunity? Because shooting for equality of outcomes has got a really, really bad track record. Essentially, it is only possible in an unfree society, and even then it has never been proven to work. Ever. Not even one time.

Nobody wants equality. People merely don’t want to be thwarted in their pursuit of a worthwhile life.

We should do what we can to ensure that special barriers aren’t erected for anyone and that everyone can succeed on their merits, but also we must balance that ideal with the fact that some people wield disproportionate power, either as a result of their merits or otherwise.

There is no easy solution, only less bad compromises

We can start with equality of opportunity if you like. But there's no way to achieve equality of opportunity in generation N+1 unless you achieve approximate equality of outcomes in generation N, because one generation's outcomes are the next generation's opportunities.

How do you expect to achieve equality of outcomes when some people are born with an IQ of 90, and others with 110? Some with 80, others with 120? And for every 130, there’s a 70 that can barely function in society, and for every 140 there’s a 60 that simply cannot?

People are not born with equal potential in athleticism or intellect. It’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

The only way to achieve equality is to severely attenuate potential to the lowest common occurrence. Pol Pot tried that.

How do you expect to achieve even equality of opportunity when those differences exist?

First, you don't need to achieve exact equality, just approximate equality. That approximate equality can incorporate a range of levels of wealth and still be enormously more equal than what we have today. It is fine if someone with an IQ of 130 has 100x the wealth of someone with IQ 70. It's not fine if someone with an IQ of 130 has 10^9x the wealth of someone with IQ 70. It's also not fine if someone with IQ 130 has 10^9x the wealth of someone else with IQ 130. (It's questionable whether IQ is even a meaningful measure, but I'm just using it here as a proxy for whatever kind of "innate ability" we want to posit.)

Second, you don't need to achieve equality of all forms of outcomes, just economic means (and political rights, etc.). Not everyone can be a concert pianist or a venture capitalist, but that's okay as long as concert pianists and venture capitalists don't have 1000x the wealth of everyone else.

It's perfectly fine for people to have different aptitude and even different levels of aptitude in general. It's just not fine for those differences to translate into enormous differences in baseline well-being (e.g., food, shelter, time).

Ironically, of course, if we achieved this, it would then be much less objectionable for Stanford to do whatever it wants, because it would mean we've created a society where going to Stanford doesn't really matter so much. But the question is what does Stanford (and everybody else) need to do in the meantime to get to that point.

Equality of opportunity is relatively easy: you provide people with the same opportunities, that they must meet at their own innate capacity and motivation.

I don’t defend that a doctor should make 20x what a nurse does, or that the c-suite should make 20000x what the janitor makes. But it’s also fine that some people don’t produce anything of value, at all, while others produce a lot of value for society. A meritocracy with a mechanism to limit suffering and harm to those who cannot participate seems a reasonable solution. We don’t need or want to incentivise parasitism at high or low levels.

> the administration probably done some basic calculation: they get more in donations from alumni who want legacy admissions for their progeny than they get from Cal Grants.

The calculation was beyond basic - I read somewhere here that it was around $3m that they were getting from Cal Grants.

Around 8 years ago, I heard (from a friend of mine) that the min donation to guarantee admission to Stanford was ~$10m. Wouldn’t be surprised that it’s even a higher number nowadays…

Applicants who get admitted due to a (very) large donation are a tiny pool, and unrelated to the legacy admission question.

Their benefit is also much clearer, the $10M donation you mentioned can clearly and directly help a lot of students.

> Their benefit is also much clearer, the $10M donation you mentioned can clearly and directly help a lot of students.

The benefit is clear, I would argue the detriment is also clear: Stanford is arguing that bribery is an acceptable method of doing business, not something that deserves opprobrium.

Bribery is the main way of doing business in America in 2025:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-08/trump-se...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/07/universities...

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/trumps-war-big-law-le...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...

The crazy thing is that they refused CalGrants not because it forces them to end legacy and donor admissions, but because they’d have to publish data about such admissions.

So the calculation was that a report showing how much unfairness there is in the admissions process will hurt the Stanford ‘brand’ by more that $3M per year. Ouch.

I mean, I think this decision also shows how much unfairness there is. I guess the difference is this is a one-time thing that people may forget about, whereas reports would be required on an ongoing basis.

I don't think SAT tests for talent and charisma. It does test for smart for some definition of smart.

Top schools in the US, of any variant, mostly don't really want good SATs as a sole measure. They may be an important factor. But admissions are far more multi-faceted--however imperfect. And however unsatisfying that may be to some people with top SAT scores.

Ok, fine, then can we stop pretending in the bullshit of the meritocracy then, and that everyone who graduated from these elite schools is so deserving?

At least the British aristocracy had the concept of noblesse oblige, while the US aristocracy loves to lecture the poors on how they should be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and it always bothers me that that analogy was invented to point out the impossibility of actually pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but somehow came to mean the opposite).

IMO the "bootstraps" thing was always an insulting joke. Something the wealthy would say to knowingly insult the poor. Go do the impossible you stupid poor person while they laugh so hard their monocles fall into their brandy. Its like spitting on someone just cause you can. Yes, this is an absurd characterization, an almost cartoonish villain trope. It's a silly world!

But something happened: people who didn't understand it was meant to indicate somthing impossible started using it like it was some moralizing good. And here we are, saying dumb shit on the internets.

The point is the saying is that it's not physically possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It's always very funny when people say it as if it means the opposite.

>it's giving an advantage to the luckiest (the ones who happened to be born into it).

Are people born smart not also "lucky"?

Not always: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/poverty-shrinks-b...

>Even at this early age, the researchers found, infants in the lower socioeconomic brackets had smaller brains than their wealthier counterparts.

I have no comment on that but, side note, was every researcher mentioned a woman?

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Stephen Jay Gould

I see where this quote is coming from… but Einstein is a bad example. His success was not from golden Stanford opportunities.

Every life decision was him opting out of responsibility and prestige to spend more time on his interests.

So “people of equal talent, and commitment to their work at the cost of all other qualities of life including relationships” looks very different than that quote wants to suggest.

The quote seems quite on the nose to me. Einstein wasn't raised by paupers.

No, he just was forced to be a refugee from his own country. Do we really have to compare suffering?

The context of this discussion is an argument that we need to find the Albert Einstein of the world to help them go to Stanford. My argument is that Einstein never went to the proverbial Stanford. In fact he avoided those things.

Einstein was a patent clerk rather than a professor. He explicitly chose not to “go to Stanford”.

you're missing his point. Cal Grants removes an advantage that actually functions in the real world.

You could make the same argument for why any kind of prejudice should be allowed since, for example, racism provides an advantage that functions in the real world. This seems like a bad defence for legacy admissions.

Legacy admissions are preference, not prejudice.

When there limited resources, prefering one type of person is prejudicing against the others.

There are hundreds of colleges, many of which have high acceptance rates and perfectly fine instruction. Are these applicants or the people in this thread then displaying preference or prejudice in the institutions they apply? And if so, what makes it different than the institutions do the same?

Where's the special admission program for lottery-winners, con-artists and pickpockets? Those also function in "the real world" - so why not at Stanford?

In the real world, individuals can't do much. It's only through the collective cooperation and the trust behind such cooperation that allows things to happen. Social Elites come with a wealth of trust from the legacies of families and connections that slowly built them up over hundreds of years. And such bonds survive even without the state, predate it and ultimately build it.

That is the "real world". Everything else is just an abstraction, propped up by a system that has only existed for a definite period of time and will not exist outside of that.

I can't help but notice the contrast in the tone (and content) of this HN discussion, compared to the one on the ruling that ended affirmative action[0] for university admissions. Then, the majority of commenters were on the side of meritocracy. HN is consistently pro-elite, perhaps because a good chunk of folk here see themselves as intellectual elites.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36520658